


Welcome Home

by AnnetheCatDetective



Category: The Big Chill (1983)
Genre: College era, Grief/Mourning, M/M, for once I write about the whole gang being nice to Michael, h/c
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-08-05 09:31:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16365311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnetheCatDetective/pseuds/AnnetheCatDetective
Summary: Michael is dealing with the loss of his parents. He's not sure he's dealing very well.At least he's not dealing alone.





	Welcome Home

Michael lies in bed, too exhausted with grief to move, to speak. Too exhausted to cry, but Alex sits at his side and strokes his hair, his back. Lets Michael curl around him and cling to him when he needs to. He’s moved into Michael’s bed with the news, hasn’t let him be alone.

 

He left Michael just for a moment to let Harold in, but even thinking Michael might be asleep, he’d returned to him immediately, returned to petting at him. Michael appreciates it, though he can’t voice his appreciation. Can’t even open his eyes. Can barely shift in closer when Alex does sit with him.

 

“How’s Michael?” Harold asks, his voice soft. Alex’ bed creaks under him as he sits across from them. 

 

“He’ll be okay, it’s just hard.” Alex says, his hands gentle as he fusses. “I’ll take care of him. He’s not doing this alone.”

 

“Well, that’s what I was coming over about. I was talking to Sam about it already-- three of our housemates over at the co-op are leaving for a place off-campus. So you and Sam and Michael could move in… After the break, maybe.”

 

“Would they let us, mid-semester?” Alex asks, his hand stilling a moment. 

 

“Sam might just do it anyway even if it’s not official. But they would, I think. At least for you two, what with… with everything. I mean… it’d be good for Michael to have more people around him, for support. Sam and I were just thinking, anyway. If you two lived with all of us, it wouldn’t be you and him alone.”

 

“I don’t mind taking care of Michael. Me and him alone, it’s not a struggle for me. But… yeah. Of course more support’s good, I just-- I don’t want you thinking it’s hard or I need help or I don’t like-- I’d do anything to take care of Michael.”

 

“He’s lucky he’s got you.”

 

Alex shakes his head, hand wrapping around the back of Michael’s neck, under his hair. “I’m lucky I’ve got him. He’s always taken care of me, too… If he needs me, then he’s got me. He’s earned me.”

 

“Well… let the rest of us take a turn sometime. Sam’s real worried. And the girls are asking if he’s eating okay and if you guys might come around for dinner.”

 

“He doesn’t have a real big appetite since. Just so long as they won’t get their feelings hurt if he doesn’t much care. I make sure he eats. And he’d appreciate that a lot, everyone caring. He’s just… It’s just hard for him.” Alex sighs, and both hands are playing over Michael now, touching his face and his hair. “His folks were nice…”

 

“You met them?”

 

He shakes his head. “He told them about me and last year when he came home from the winter break they… they sent cookies and a pair of socks back to school with him for me, I mean… can you believe that? Just for living with him.”

 

“Well not just for that. Presumably because whatever Michael had to say about you was good.”

 

“Still. They didn’t have to do that. Anyway, I’m taking him home with me, for break. He’d have done the same for me.”

 

He says it with such unshakeable faith that Michael wants to respond somehow. All he can really do is shift closer to press his forehead against Alex’ hip, the noise from the back of his throat small but emphatic.

 

“Hey, baby, you awake?” Alex asks, his tone so soft, his touch so soft… so achingly tender with Michael’s broken places. 

 

Michael hums, digs his hand out from where it’s been cradled in against his heart, as if he could somehow hold himself together physically. He snakes it under Alex’ leg, curls it around his knee and holds on. Lets himself be hushed with that same aching tenderness. 

 

“You wanna have dinner with the gang later?”

 

“‘kay.” 

 

“Just eat what you can and they’ll understand.”

 

“It’s just going to be macaroni and cheese and peas, I think. And a pan of brownies, if you’re up for dessert.” Harold rises. “I’ve got to get to class, but when I see the others, I’ll let them know you said yes. And Sam’s coming over, too. He said he’d have your notes for you then.”

 

He crosses to them, leaning in to give Michael’s shoulder a firm squeeze, before slipping out.

 

“Michael…” Alex sighs, leans over until his body is curled over Michael, as if he could protect him. His forehead rests against Michael’s hip, one arm against his back, one wrapped around his thighs. “I’ve got you, okay? I’ve got you.”

 

Michael sobs, once, and holds on tighter. 

 

“You won’t be alone… nothing else is going to happen to you. Not if I have anything to say about it. We’ll move into the co-op with our friends, okay? Or we’ll stay here if you really want, but-- I mean, we’ll be together. I’ll go with you, for everything. And you’ll come with me, for the holidays. For all the holidays. Forever. Michael… we belong together, don’t we? So I’ll take care of you.”

 

“I dreamed she called me on the phone.” He says, voice wobbling. “I dreamed she called me and said it was all a mistake. That it was all a mistake and she was so sorry someone would scare me with a call like that when it was someone else’s car. But they’d see me soon, and-- and she wanted to know if my birthday present arrived. And I said it did. And then she said she had to go, there was a knock on the door and she had to go, but she’d talk to me Saturday.”

 

The tears start, and Alex holds on tighter, but there’s no keeping it all in now.

 

“When I woke up, and I remembered… and I remembered it was real, it felt like… like they died all over again. Every night I dream it wasn’t real and every morning I wake up feeling okay and then it hits me and… how long is it like this?”

 

“I don’t know… I don’t know. Maybe a long time. I’m here, though. I-- As long as you need me.”

 

They lay there a long moment, curled around each other in opposite directions, Michael sobbing, ugly and ragged until he can control himself a little, enough to try to speak again.

 

“I wanna go home and I can’t, it’s not, it’s just… it’s  _ empty _ and I hate it! And no one knows what it’s like, no one here understands… and I don’t-- I don’t want anyone to, but it’s  _ lonely _ .”

 

Alex unwraps himself from around Michael so that he can turn around and lie with him face to face. 

 

“Just-- just stay with me.” Alex whispers, squeezing him tighter than ever, and Michael buries his face against Alex’ neck. “Stay with me, stay with me, stay with me…”

 

“Where else would I go?” Michael asks bleakly.

 

“I don’t know.” Alex says, but he says it like he does know, like it terrifies him. A thought hangs in the hair’s breadth space between them and sends a shiver through Michael. The home he can’t go back to, his parents. The only other place he figures he could go, only it’s not a place, and he holds on tight.

 

“I’ll stay with you. If you stay with me?”

 

“As long as you need me. Promise.”

 

“It’s true, you know… I got the package in the mail, and I didn’t open it because it came early, and… and now it’s the last thing they’ll ever have gotten me and I don’t know if I can.”

 

“That’s okay. It’s okay.” Alex rubs his back. “It’ll be there when you’re ready.”

 

“I just don’t want to think about… anything.” He pulls back enough to meet Alex’ eyes, frowning softly, searching out some hidden answer, seeing Alex search him right back. “Alex? Make it stop?”

 

He nods. His lips ghost over Michael’s jaw, hands moving to slide up under his shirt. 

 

They normally talk the whole time. They don’t now. There’s nothing that can really be  _ said _ . Michael just needs the world to go away for a while, and talking about anything just means his brain has to work, means something outside the bed has to exist to talk about. 

 

Alex understands. Alex understands without Michael having to voice it. He kisses his cheeks, and plays with his hair, gentle, and he coaxes him up so that he can undress him. With reverence, or with the care he’d give a wounded animal, or with both those things at once. With nearly unwavering eye contact, with a bone-weary sunk-deep pain in his eyes to match Michael’s, but it isn’t  _ pity _ . It’s only his own suffering intersecting with Michael’s, and maybe they both need this. Alex doesn’t know loss like Michael does, and Michael is glad he doesn’t, but he knows suffering, was born to it. They both were, Michael thinks, born to pain, to some awful internal thing that claws sometimes and saps the color from life. 

 

And Alex is gentle pushing him back down onto his back once they’re undressed, leaves him long enough to double check the lock on the door before covering him once more beneath the safety of his broad shoulders, his strong back. His breath warm against Michael’s throat, where nothing else in the world has been warm for days.

 

He hadn’t had the drive for this, at first, wouldn’t have been able to think of it. On that first trip back, funeral arrangements unmade, when they’d given him the things that had survived the crash and given him the keys to the house and talked him through what he needed to sign. No aunts or uncles, no one but himself for any of it. Explained to him about the money, what his parents had left to charity and what they’d left to him, out of the modest savings they had had, the two insurance payouts that would come to him and who he could call if he needed help dealing with it. 

 

Sex had been the furthest thing from his mind, until Alex offered-- had said this was just for Michael, if he wanted, to not worry about doing anything for him. Was because Alex figured he wasn’t taking care of himself, either, and it was better to deal with it on his own terms than let it build up. Which, when he put it that way, had sounded reasonable. Michael hadn’t wanted to risk the melding of the grief nightmares he’d been having with the inevitable wet dream that would come with self-neglect, he just didn’t have any real desire. But then Alex had wrapped an arm around his waist and a hand around his cock, and tucked his head against Michael’s shoulder, and he hadn’t talked about anything, except to say he was there, and his touch was so familiar… so safe, so good, and for a too-brief moment, Michael didn’t need to think or feel anything beyond Alex.

 

Alex gets him hard, with a well-practiced hand, and lines them up together in the same grip, and reminds Michael that he’s still alive. He fills the sucking void in Michael’s chest with something light and sweet again, and it drains away too fast, but it’s there. For just a moment, it’s there and he can feel something other than ‘bereft’. 

 

Outside of sex, the only relief he’d had from the crushing weight of his loss had been the exam he’d had the other day-- the exam he’d had to come back to school for, instead of staying at the house sorting through possessions and arranging a service. He’d been able to focus on that.

 

Alex kisses him, after. They never used to-- kissing wasn’t part of the arrangement they’d come up with last year. It wasn’t supposed to mean anything, when they started, but the first time he fell asleep against Alex instead of in separate beds, he knew it meant something to him, and then they started falling asleep together more and more, just for a little nap after, before getting cleaned up and turning in for the night in their own beds.

 

Now, Alex kisses him, and tells him they belong together, that they’ll always be together, and he doesn’t know what he’d do without that, he just wishes it didn’t sometimes feel like a horrible tradeoff. But it isn’t Alex’ fault it took this to make them admit it, Michael hadn’t been ready to talk about love, either. 

 

Now that he needs it, now that he’d be lost without someone, at least Alex is ready, is willing to be all of this for him. Had he longed to, privately, in months before, as Michael had? The too-few, too-fleeting phone calls over the summer, had he listened for longing in Michael’s voice? Those months living back under their parents’ roofs, had he passed up dates with girls from his own old neighborhood who might have put out, thinking of Michael instead? They hadn’t been very free to talk about anything personal like that. Michael had only really said it was lonely back home, that he missed Alex and all the rest of their friends, had to mention all the others out of fear that if Alex didn’t hear what he really meant, his parents might. When they had returned to campus, had Alex wanted to run to Michael’s arms, too? To swing him around and tell him how boring life was without him? Did Alex ever look over at him in the dark, in the night, and think in silent desperation,  _ him, him, him _ ? Ask the universe if there was such a thing as a soulmate, if yours could be another boy, and if that boy could be lying there across the dorm room, please couldn’t he be?

 

Alex kisses him, trembles when he does, his hands cupping Michael’s cheeks, as careful as if Michael was spun sugar. 

 

Alex kisses him, and for just a shining fraction of a moment more, Michael forgets he isn’t whole anymore.

 

“Get some rest, baby…” Alex urges, as if Michael hasn’t been resting most of the day. He still feels like he needs it, though… that much is true. “I’ll wake you when it’s time to head over for dinner.”

 

“‘kay. Alex? I-- Thanks.”

 

“You don’t have to thank me… you’d do it for me. I just-- I want to take care of you.”

 

“I would.” Michael nods. “I love you.”

 

Alex breaks out into a smile, slow and sweet and blinding in the face of everything else in Michael’s life. Bright enough to hold onto a little longer. He leans back down over Michael, kisses the hollow of his throat.

 

“I love you.” He leaves the words there, before he lifts his head again and goes in for Michael’s lips. “I love you. I always-- I do.”

 

Michael thinks about the two plain gold rings sitting together on his parents’ dresser. He’d gone into their room only once, to put them there, couldn’t bear to disturb anything else on that last visit to the house. The weight of them in the big envelope that had been placed in his hand with a heavy apology. The twenty-five years his parents wore them. How close to twenty-six they’d come. 

 

There are things he and Alex can’t have. But he thinks about giving him a ring, someday, of slipping off alone together, of calling themselves something in private even if they can’t claim it in public. If Alex loves him, if he wants to be with him forever, to take care of each other… At least they know they can live together, sort of, and once they move into the house, that’s better proof. They know they fit. He doesn’t see why they couldn’t always have this. If they can come through this the way they’ve come through a year’s worth of bad days together, he doesn’t see why they couldn’t stay together for the rest of their lives. 

 

He lets Alex soothe him back into a light sleep. Wakes up tucked into his bed, with clothes hanging over the back of his desk chair.

 

They walk to the co-op, Alex’ arm around him, they let themselves in when they get there, and Michael is struck dumb by the banner, string and cardboard letters they must have cut by hand, HAPPY BRITHDAY MICHAEL, and beneath that, WELCOME HOME.

 

“I know it’s tomorrow--” Harold starts.

 

“And we can’t move in until after the break, but--” Sam adds. 

 

“But we thought…”

 

Michael hears Alex’ laugh, feels his own smile, and then he’s laughing as well.

 

“And Sam fucked up the sign.” Nick adds, laughing when Sam shoves at him-- rather ineffectively.

 

“The anniversary of my  _ brith _ isn’t for another  _ nine _ days.” Michael jokes, though he doesn’t expect the joke to land. If he thought it would be taken for anything other than silliness, he doesn’t think he’d have made it, would have been too self-conscious even among friends.

 

Alex pulls him down and kisses the side of his head. “Then we’ll stick to happy early birthday, it’s closer.”

 

“Yeah I don’t know how you’d celebrate the other thing.” He chuckles. 

 

“Come on, presents!” Karen comes forward to take his arm, dragging him to the middle of the couch. 

 

The other three housemates have made themselves scarce, it seems, no one to interrupt the party, and Michael lets himself be surrounded, his friends pushing packages at him. A record from Harold that he’s so enthusiastically  _ sure _ Michael will like, and Sam and Meg both got him books, ones he finds he does actually want to read, he wouldn’t have imagined before that he might want things, care about things. A paisley shirt from Karen that would be too long on anyone else, in colors that suit him, the assertion that he’ll look good in it, especially with how his hair has grown out just over the last year. A sweatshirt from Sarah. Three boxes of coffee-flavored hard caramels from Nick, who starts to say it’s not much, but Michael won’t hear it. He loves them, could probably go through an entire box mindlessly during a single cram session, and it’s the first time since the call that he’s looked at something and felt like he genuinely  _ wanted _ to put it in his mouth, wasn’t just satisfying the demands of a growling stomach or a fretting Alex. And okay, it’s candy and not food, but still, he’s looking  _ forward _ to it. And it is just candy, the fact he thinks he could almost cry over it is  _ stupid _ …

 

Only it isn’t just candy, it’s all the presents, and the banners, both banners, he looks again at ‘WELCOME HOME’ and has to blink back tears, as Alex squeezes his knee. Alex, sitting at his feet, producing a small package from within his coat pocket. Small, but definitely not so small he thinks he shouldn’t have noticed Alex was carrying something.

 

“I didn’t know there was going to be a surprise party or I’d have brought your real present, but… I wanted to find a time to give you this anyway.” Alex shrugs, and presses it into Michael’s hand, and it’s a scarf, thick and warm, rolled up as tight as possible and springing into looser coils on being unwrapped. 

 

“This isn’t my real present?” He swallows, his voice sounding a little thick in his own ears. 

 

“Well, you gotta have something for tomorrow.” Another shrug, and Alex settles, leaning against his legs, head lolling against a knee as Michael loops the scarf around himself. 

 

And when they all drag him to the table to feed him macaroni and cheese, and brownies they’ve stuck birthday cake candles down into, Michael finds he has enough appetite.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this was difficult but therapeutic... Thank you for reading.


End file.
